When I Was Wilburt

One More Story That Is Mine:

The year is 1892. My name is Wilburt and I'm sitting in the sunshine rocking slowly in a wooden rocker on the verandah of a rugged log home somewhere in the Smokey Mountains of Kentucky. The surroundings are slovenly, messy with dog bones and various bits of rope and tools lying about. An ugly dog lies in the grass and gnaws periodically on pieces of scrap and old bits of bone. His name is Gaper, because he gapes a lot. Nothing is cared for. I don't really much care about anything. My body is unwashed and grizzly. I scratch at a shaggy growth, dark greasy hair falling in my bleary eyes. I belch, burp, spit without noticing the saliva that drips from a partially paralyzed mouth. My tongue hasn't a lot of feeling in it. My teeth are stained black from tobacco and pipe smoke. I do feel the sunshine on my back and the sweat coming through my filthy shirt. My feet are bare and unsightly. My nails are long, cracked, and grey with grime. I like the company of the pitiful dog. It shits and whines and slobbers, but dammit, he's mine.

The home is mine too, and one small flicker of satisfaction resulting from that fact remains. It’s my verandah I sit on to rock, and I look down yonder to where the river turns and gleams jade green at the bend. Once when I was young and in better shape, there was a woman. She had long, chestnut hair that fell down her back or over bare breasts that brought a man's need strongly forward. There was one child, a little girl. They are both long gone. Only a memory of green eyes and smooth, tanned skin, a turned up, freckled nose, and brown, deliciously nippled, lavender scented breasts remains now. Sarah. That memory is kept in one special place in a mind dimmed with the sordidness that has become my life. Somehow I know it is my fault, this mess. But I don’t know how to fix it.

I have my gun which brings me my eatin’. Rabbits, geese, and ducks mostly. I tried skunk once, but wasn’t too inclined. And now I no longer care. There is the sunshine, and the dog, and my rocker which sooths me a little from my misery. Old Dead Eye Pete comes around now and again. Brings me my chewin’ tobacco. Slaps me in my sore shoulder even though I’ve told him a million times not to. The only touch I git though, better than nothing I guess. A far cry though from the darling I held in my arms when we were young, and I ravished her body with my need as she groaned with her own, soft moans that were the sweetest sound on earth.

It’s funny though, there are times that I don’t seem to be alone, and even though I’m old and I smell, I swear there is a lavender scent born on the wind sometimes, and I feel a soft caress on my cheek. I could swear I hear her whisper my name, real soft-like, “Wilburt”.

Ain’t much more to tell, now. I just sit and rock and chew and spit along with old Gaper. Sometime Old Pete will come around and I’ll be gone on to the Great Land somewhere off above that sunshine and I’ll be breathin’ lavender for sure.

Later, when there was just a lone, grey stone on the hill just up from the river, the wind blew the wild daisies against the rough granite. I came, all cleaned up now, and young agin’, with my smiling, lavender-scented missus holding my hand. I noticed the name carved, "Wilbur" and thought, "They coulda got it right, couldn’t they? Somebody shoulda got it right.   It was Wilburt, dammit. Wilburt! "

cailin raine